The State of Fostoria, Ohio

A few years ago, filmmaker Hart Perry (Harlan County, American Dream) and I shot a short documentary about Fostoria, a small town in Ohio whose Autolite spark plug plant was spoken of in the early 1990s by NAFTA supporters as the kind of business that would benefit from the new free-trade deal. As I wrote in a 2011 article for Le monde diplomatique, by November 2010, only eighty-six assembly jobs remained at the factory, and those workers were making only the ceramic insulators that go around the plug. The plugs themselves were being manufactured by some 600 Mexicans working in a maquiladora south of the border.

“Attributing white-on-black violence entirely to racism misses the larger problems that poorer people face in this country. They suffer a thousand cuts that never get talked about, except when the victims bleed to death.”

you also forgot to mention the antitrust suit bought against Ford for buying the plant in the 60′s but because of politics the deal was deemed a monopoly even though GM OWNED Delco and made their own spark plugs. HAD FORD been left owning the plant it might have grown and stayed in this dying town. Every industry say one has gone. When once you could hit the bricks in our town and start looking for a job early in the morn you could virtually be guarantied of finding work before sundown.

“Eight months pregnant I told an old woman sitting beside me on the bus that the egg that hatched my baby came from my wife’s ovaries. I didn’t know how the old woman would take it; one can never know. She was delighted: That’s like a fairy tale!”

“Between 2007 and 2010, Albany’s poverty rate jumped 12 points, to a record high of 39.9 percent. More than two thirds of Albany’s 76,000 residents are black, and since 2010, their poverty rate has climbed even higher, to nearly 42 percent.”

“We think we are the only people in the world who live with threat, but we have to work with regional leaders who will work with us. Bibi is taking the country into unprecedented international isolation.”

Photograph by Adam Golfer

Ratio of money spent by Britons on prostitution to that spent on hairdressing:

“Shelby is waiting for something. He himself does not know what it is. When it comes he will either go back into the world from which he came, or sink out of sight in the morass of alcoholism or despair that has engulfed other vagrants.”